Visual Studio - Markup syntax highlighting inside script[type:txt/html]

Question

Does anyone know how or if its possible for Visual Studio 2008 to highlight the html syntax inside a script block of type "text/html" just like any other markup on an aspx/html page. I'm using the script block to house my templates for client-side templating.

Answer 1

Two ideas come to mind, assuming the page itself is an ASP.NET page (and not a plain HTML page) :

1. create a custom control which emits the script tag and end-tag. By using a custom control, you'll fool the IDE into not knowing about the script tag, and so you'll get the same syntax coloring as the enclosing page's HTML
2. extract the script block's contents into a user control, and place an instance of that user control inside the script block. Since VS doesn't know that the user control's content will be inside a script block, you'll get syntax coloring.

I like the first option better, as it doesn't force you to split your page into multiple files.

If it's a plain HTML page, there's not many easy ways to do this. If "not easy" is OK, then you can alwasy create an HttpModule which replaces a placeholder tag in the source code (e.g. <myscript>) with, upon output to the user, a real text/html script tag.